Chapter 6

Going to Town

Though they could buy most of their supplies in our little town, the farmers of Shinbone went to Oxford to sell their cotton and other farm products.  It took at least two days to go there and back and do any trading.  They went in wagons, sometimes in covered wagons.  There were usually a number of people there from different places, sometimes a number of women.  Some of them would stay several days just having a good time. They would build a big campfire in the wagon yard and all sit around it at night talking until all hours.  If they wished, they slept in their wagons or in the wagon yard house on their bed rolls on the floor.  If the women were along, they cooked meals on the campfire.

Papa had a ration box (a round cheese hoop) that he always carried to town.  He would carry enough food to last until his return home; however, he usually supplemented it with something extra from the store such as cheese, sweet crackers, sweet pickles, dates, bananas or candy.  He would always bring home some of what he had bought to eat, and we would always rush for the ration box to see what was inside.  Papa liked candy more than anything and always came home with a bag of it in his pocket.  That was one thing we could depend on, not only when we were small, but even after we were big kids.

Most of the women and children didn’t go to town often.  I remember once we rode a streetcar from Oxford to Anniston.  When we got there the conductor came through and turned the seats over and we sat down facing the other way and rode back to Oxford and down to Oxford Lake where we saw swans and a man and woman in a red boat on the lake.  I recall seeming a model in a store window on Noble Street in Anniston that I thought was a big doll.  It was so pretty.  I don’t remember where we stayed that night, but not in the wagon yard.  We had a number of relatives and friends living there.  We had lived in Oxanna between Oxford and Anniston, and also in Choccolocco Valley, nearby.

Papa took Elsie and me to town with him once on a load of cotton bales.  He fixed a comfortable place for us to sit and we started out that morning in high spirits, but that fourteen mile road stretched out pretty long before we got there.  When we got over the mountain in sight of town with its black smoke boiling up from the smoke stacks, how excited we were.  How good the coal smoke smelled.  We could hardly wait to get there, and when we arrived the scent of cigar smoke mingled with the other delightful aromas of town was just too wonderful for words.  Even the mothball scent on the new clothes in the stores was grand.

We stayed at Uncle Jube Elder’s that night.  He lived in a big two story house with an upstairs balcony and an iron fence around the yard, and a cellar.  What fun we had sliding down the cellar door.  While playing, we heard an automobile coming up the hill; we ran and hung onto the fence and watched it go by.  There were two men riding in it and they waved at us.  We waved back and ran back to sliding down the cellar door.

On the way to Oxford, we crossed Hilliby Creek five times, sometimes fording it.  The beautiful covered bridge I remember crossing then, and again in 1948, washed away years ago.  When I was there in the autumn of 1968, that area was the most beautiful drive I saw on my entire trip, but engineers were surveying and staking off a large part of it for a lake.  All this colorful beauty has been spoiled.  This area, in a drive from Ashland, county seat of Clay County, through our little valley, by Dempsey and Cheaha Mountain and on into Anniston is included in highly recommended “autumn scenes of unusually beauty” by travel experts in the October, 1966, Southern Living Magazine.

While driving along this winding road, crossing this meandering stream in 1968, I was reminded of an incident Papa told us about when we were small.

Once, there was an Indian woman who got off the train at Oxford.  She looked around until she found a man to take her where she wanted to go, having him take a pick and shovel along.  He took her in a buggy to a place on Hilliby Creek.  She looked until she found a certain beech tree.  She had the man climb the tree and look for a certain mark.  He found the mark just as she described it.  Then she stepped so many steps in a certain direction from the tree and told him to dig there.  He dug awhile and she told him to leave.  He left, leaving her there.  He went back late and found an old iron pot near the hole with a lid nearby.  There was no way of knowing what was in the pot.

On one road between Shinbone and Oxford, there is a blue pond.  There is a legend told by Creek Indians regarding this pond.  A woman, supposedly bad, was burned with her family at the stake.  Whether she was white or Indian was not clarified – but, as they burned, the Indians performed a special dance around them, and as they dance, the ground collapsed and swallowed them up, forming a pond.  As I recall Blue Pond, there wasn’t any water there, only a low area that had a bluish look.

We went to Lineville one time and saw the first train come into town.  A large crowd had gathered for the occasion.  As the train came into sight, the people began to cheer and kept on cheering as it came in, puffing slowly along, its black smoke filling the air.  A track laying machine came ahead of the train, laying the track, first the crossties, then the rails.  A group of men, some of them black, with brown paper bags on their heads for caps, spiked the track down just ahead of the locomotive.  There was a barbeque in the grove outside of town.  We attended and saw Murle Davis there – the only person there we knew.  The Davis’s had moved to Lineville sometime before that.  Rufus Moore and Dona lived there and we visited them.  Rufus was doing some photographic work and showed us some of his pictures.

One other time we went to Lineville to see the Hague Bros. Circus.  Papa had heard it was coming and asked if we wanted to go.  Did we?  We had heard Uncle Rich’s folks talk about Ringling Brothers Circus they had seen in Anniston and we were thrilled at the idea of going to a circus, and on that morning were ready bright and early.

Everyone who ever saw a circus as a child knows something of the thrill this circus was to us.  The pomp and glitter of the parade, the elephants and camels and tasseled horses stepping high, the lion and tigers in cages, and the bears (I learned to respect bears that day, had always thought of them as mean things).  Then, the big tent and all the unbelievable things those pretty girls could do – and, oh, those colored balloons on sticks, striped walking canes, riding whips and cotton candy!  Children now have so many things that are maybe more thrilling than a circus, but not then.  For days, I went around in a dream, imagining myself a trapeze artist, or the girl who rode the elephant, or the one who stood up on the horse as it ran around the ring.